Ever wondered how to move your organization’s emails from a shared mailbox or a public folder when migrating to Google Apps for Business?
We’ve just launched the Google Apps Groups Migration API that provides Google Apps developers the ability to build tools that can move shared emails from any data source (typically shared mailboxes, public folders and discussion databases) to their domain’s Google Groups discussion archives. Google Groups provides a simple and easy way to ‘tag’ the migrated emails into manageable groups that can be easily accessed by users with group membership.
This new api complements existing Google Groups api’s like Google Apps Provisioning API which can be used to create new groups (to which the shared emails can then be migrated using the newly launched API) and Google Apps Groups Settings API which can be used to control access to the group. The addition of the Google Apps Groups Migration API thus makes the ‘shared folder’ experience seamless even after migration to Google Apps. To learn more and try out this new feature visit Google Developers.
Anyone else get stuck with fixing their family's computer problems? Recently I had a family technical issue that was actually fun to solve and didn't involve removing malware. My family owns Rasmus Auctioneers, a global auctioneer company based in Alexandria, Virginia. The company uses Google Apps for their entire business workflow, so their documents, calendars, etc. are all connected.
We manage the shipping process on-site using a tablet. In this fast-paced environment and with limited time, we need a quick, easy solution. When an auction ends, the clients fill out a Google Form that saves their shipping and payment information to a Google Spreadsheet. This information then needs to be sent to a specific mover for processing -- but the mover doesn't need all the data, just a few important pieces. All of this needs to happen with as little human intervention as possible.
Our solution was to create an Apps Script within the spreadsheet, which means our new functionality works in the tablets used on the auction floor. The function below runs when the sheet is opened, automatically sorting the sheet to put the newest client on top. A simple dialog determines which data is important for a particular auction; the script then finds the data we need, sends it to the right person, and adds a calendar event as a reminder.
function sendData() { // Sort the rows var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet(); sheet.sort(4); // What row do we want? var myValue = Browser.inputBox("What row?"); // Variables var emailRecipients = "me@mydomain.com"; var emailSubject = "Moving data for "; var valueToShow = ""; // Get cell values var clientName = sheet.getRange("B" + myValue).getValue(); var movingDate = sheet.getRange("D" + myValue).getValue(); valueToShow += "Name: " + sheet.getRange("B" + myValue).getValue() + "\r\n"; valueToShow += "Moving Date: " + sheet.getRange("D" + myValue).getValue() + "\r\n"; valueToShow += "Size: " + sheet.getRange("E" + myValue).getValue() + "\r\n"; // Send email MailApp.sendEmail(emailRecipients, emailSubject + clientName, valueToShow); // Add to calendar CalendarApp.createAllDayEvent("Move today! " + clientName, new Date(movingDate)); }
Looking at the source code, we can see how we collect the data from the relevant columns, add them to a variable, and in one line send it via Gmail. Adding a reminder to our calendar also takes just one line.
Do you have a repetitive process that bugs you? Wish there was a way to automate something? You might be able to solve your problems the same way I helped out my family -- with Apps Script! Feel free to leave a comment on some ideas or suggestions for future projects.
In an earlier blog post, we announced the Election Info sample app. We briefly talked about how we were able to use Apps Script to easily create a comprehensive sample application that provided timely voting information. This post shows just how easy it is to use Apps Script to get information from an external API and integrate with various Google services to create a rich web application and provide a meaningful user experience.
First, we use UrlFetchApp to get JSON from the Google Civic Information API and use Utilities.jsonParse to convert it to a useful javascript object.
var url = 'https://www.googleapis.com/civicinfo/us_v1/voterinfo/2000/lookup'; var address = { "address" : "1263 Pacific Ave. Kansas City KS" }; var options = { method : "post", contentType : "application/json", payload: Utilities.jsonStringify(address) }; var responseText = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, options).getContentText(); var response = Utilities.jsonParse(responseText);
After getting the response object, we can simply drill into it to access various data provided by the API.
One of the things the response object provides us with is the election date. Using Apps Script's Calendar service, it is really easy to create an event on voting day in the user's calendar with the polling address. First, we create a Date object from the date string. We then create an all-day event on the default calendar on this date, passing along the polling address we get from the response object.
// create a Date object from the response date string // ("2012-11-6" --> Date object) var [year, month, day] = response.election.electionDay.split('-'); // javascript months are zero-indexed var electionDate = new Date(year, month-1, day); // get the first polling location's address var pollAddress = response.pollingLocations[0].address; var cal = CalendarApp.getDefaultCalendar(); cal.createAllDayEvent("Go Vote!", electionDate, {location:pollAddress});
Using the Maps service, we can generate static maps with the user's home or polling address as shown in the following code snippet. We display these maps on the web app page, then embed them in the reminder email and bring-along document as we will show in the following sections.
var userAddress = response.normalizedInput; var normalizedAddress = userAddress.line1 + ' ' + userAddress.city + ', ' + userAddress.state + ' ' + userAddress.zip; // normalizedAddress looks like "501 Kildaire Rd Chapel Hill, NC 27516" var staticMapUrl = Maps.newStaticMap().setSize(600, 300) .addMarker(normalizedAddress) .getMapUrl();
We also provide a simple method for users to email themselves all of this information. Using the Gmail service, we can send an HTML email that embeds the voting information and the static maps we generated above. The Apps Script documentation contains great tutorials such as the Maps tutorial we used to generate the directions below.
var email = Session.getActiveUser().getEmail(); var body = 'Election Date: ' + electionDate + '<br/>' + 'Your polling address: ' + pollAddress + '<br/>' + 'Polling Hours: ' + pollingHours + '<br/>' + '<img src="' + directions.mapUrl + '"/> <br/>' + 'Directions: ' + dirList; MailApp.sendEmail(email, 'Upcoming Election Voting Information', 'Voting Info', {htmlBody: body});
Using the Document service, we were able to easily generate a bring-along document with polling address, hours, and directions. The follow code excerpt shows how easy it is to add different elements like headers, tables, and paragraphs to a document. Apps Script also provides an extensive list of methods to programmatically control the look and presentation of the various elements.
var title = "Voting Information"; var doc = DocumentApp.create(title + " for " + homeAddress); var reportTitle = doc.appendParagraph(title); reportTitle.setFontFamily(DocumentApp.FontFamily.ARIAL) .setFontSize(22).setForegroundColor('#4A86E8') .setBold(true) .setAlignment(DocumentApp.HorizontalAlignment.CENTER); var header = doc.addHeader(); header.appendParagraph('Generated by the Election Info application ' + 'built on Google Apps Script') .setAlignment(DocumentApp.HorizontalAlignment.CENTER) .setAttributes({ITALIC : true}); var tableStyle = {}; tableStyle[DocumentApp.Attribute.PADDING_BOTTOM] = 0; tableStyle[DocumentApp.Attribute.PADDING_TOP] = 0; tableStyle[DocumentApp.Attribute.PADDING_LEFT] = 0; tableStyle[DocumentApp.Attribute.PADDING_RIGHT] = 0; var addressTable = doc.appendTable([ ['Your address: ' + homeAddress], ['Your Polling Location: ' + pollAddress], [''] ]).setAttributes(tableStyle); // add appropriately sized poll location image addressTable.getCell(1,0).appendImage(pollImg.getBlob()) .setHeight(300).setWidth(600); // populate last row of the table with polling hours addressTable.getCell(2,0).clear().appendParagraph("Polling Hours: "); addressTable.getCell(2,0).appendParagraph( UserProperties.getProperty(Keys.POLLING_HOURS));
Here is an image which shows the generated bring-along document embedded with static map images from the Maps service.
Apps Script allowed us to easily take information from an external API and tie it into various Google services to provide a great user experience. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post showing how we created the front end!
"No file is an island." John Donne said something a bit like this in 1620 A. D., hundreds of years before the internet was ever invented, and it just gets more and more true as time goes on. In our online world of information, entertainment, and socializing, everyone is connected -- and everyone wants to collaborate.
Would you like to open a collaborative space in your Drive app by injecting comments and discussion threads in your users' files? This is now easily done with the Drive API. Using the new comments and replies resources together with a simple anchoring scheme to nail down the location of comments in your document, you can provide discussion threads much like the ones found in Google Docs.
Our new commenting model has two layers:
In a typical scenario, an app gets the head revision of a file, lists the existing discussions, and inserts or deletes comments and replies as needed. It’s recommended that apps should also perform user permission checks and make sure commenters are authorized. These best practices, along with a complete reference for anchoring comments in files, are detailed in Managing Comment and Discussions in the Drive SDK.
For a great example of commenting best practices, you won’t need to look any further than the Google docs in your Drive. The features you see in our own implementation -- highlighted anchoring, UI options to reply, resolve, edit and delete -- are all available for you to add to your own app.
We look forward to seeing how you integrate comments and discussions in to your Drive app! Do a better job than Google docs, and we promise to be more pleased than surprised. If you have questions or feedback about comments and discussions, don’t hesitate to let us know on our Stack Overflow tag, google-drive-sdk.
Some enterprise applications need to programmatically access their users’ data without any manual authorization on their part. For example, you might want to use the Tasks API to add a task to all of your employees’ Google Tasks lists during the holiday season to remind them of something like, “Come pick up your holiday gift at the front desk!” Or, you might want to run some company-wide analysis of the content of your employees’ Google Drive.
In Google Apps domains, the domain administrator can grant applications domain-wide access to its users' data — this is referred as domain-wide delegation of authority. This basically allows applications to act on behalf of Google Apps domain users when using APIs.
Until recently this technique was mostly performed using 2-Legged OAuth 1.0a (2-LO). However, with the deprecation of the OAuth 1.0 protocol and the resulting programmed shutdown of 2-LO, the recommended authorization mechanism is now to use OAuth 2.0 and service accounts.
Unlike regular Google accounts that belong to an end user, service accounts are owned by your application and therefore identify your application. They can be created in the Google APIs Console and come with their own OAuth 2.0 credentials.
Google Apps domain administrators can delegate domain-wide authority to the service account’s credentials for a set of APIs. This results in allowing the application, by using the service account’s credentials, to act on behalf of the Google Apps domain’s users.
If you’d like to learn more, have a look at the recently published Google Drive SDK documentation on using OAuth 2.0 and service accounts for domain-wide delegation of authority.. These documents provide a step by step process and code samples to help you get started with service accounts.
From nations choosing presidents to offices selecting which coffee to brew, we often find ourselves involved in election systems designed to choose the best option. This spring my alma mater's solar vehicle team, CalSol, needed to elect new leaders. Our previous system was painfully slow, involved "raising hands" in a room, and excluded any team members who could not attend a specific meeting. I set out to solve these problems and the result was an easy method for running fair elections in a matter of minutes.
I was able to build the system completely on Google products and technologies:
I used a lesser known voting system called instant-runoff voting (IRV), or the alternative vote, which asks voters to rank candidates rather than cast a single vote. These votes, along with a secret voting key which I provided to each member, are recorded with a Google Form that automatically populates a spreadsheet. The code in Apps Script looks through the spreadsheet to count the votes while ensuring that each voting key is only used once. The secret keys not only prevent voters from casting multiple votes, but they also allow voters to change their vote by submitting the form again.
Below is a simplified snippet of code that shows the general process used to calculate the winner.
/* Some code omitted for clarity */ /* candidates is a list of names (strings) */ var candidates = get_all_candidates(results_range); /* votes is an object mapping candidate names -> number of votes */ var votes = get_votes(results_range, candidates, keys_range, valid_keys); /* winner is candidate name (string) or null */ var winner = get_winner(votes, candidates); while (winner == null) { /* Modify candidates to only include remaining candidates */ get_remaining_candidates(votes, candidates); if (candidates.length == 0) { Browser.msgBox("Tie"); return; } votes = get_votes(results_range, candidates, keys_range, valid_keys); winner = get_winner(votes, candidates); } Browser.msgBox("Winner: " + winner);
I learned that putting a little effort into Apps Script can make people happy and save a lot of time. The team feedback was outstanding. One CalSol member said the process was an "Excellent, clean, and professional voting process. This should become a standard [for the team]." I was elated when I was able to close the polls during a meeting and announce the winners of twelve independent elections in just a matter of minutes.
If you like, you can watch a video demonstrating how to create and run your own election using this script:
Try the script yourself to make sure your coffee preferences are heard!
It’s time for the 2012 General Election in the United States and along with it comes the tedious process of finding your voter registration, polling sites, times, directions, etc. The previously announced Google Civic Information API provides a great service to programmatically obtain much of this information based on the your home address. Google Apps Script makes it really quick and easy to build a web application that queries this information and uses various Google services to organize and track your information.
Election Info is a sample application built using Apps Script that can:
HtmlService
UrlFetch
MapsService
UserProperties
As you can see, this is a comprehensive sample app that is useful while also highlighting key Apps Script capabilities.
Install the app from the Chrome Web Store. Check back soon as we will be writing a blog post with details and sample code on how the sample was built.
